Conducing to the knowledge of the universe and trade': the Role of Goldsmiths in Materializing the Early Modern Globe c. 1600-1700

Description

Goldsmiths and jewellers were highly versatile artisans in the early modern world. In addition to working with precious metals and stones, many also travelled as gem traders, and visited the sites where gem mining occurred. Focusing on Dutch and British East India Company networks that developed over the course of the seventeenth century, this paper follows jewellers’ travels to diamond mines in Borneo and India. The world’s only known sources of diamonds until the 1720s, these mine sites were already well-established nodes in Indian Ocean trade networks, which attracted Europeans to the region as much as its famous spices. Goldsmiths who voyaged to the East Indies visited mines and markets, and conveyed resulting insights from Asian environments and interlocutors to their clients, investors, business partners, and interested scholars (sometimes one and the same). In addition to these itinerant experts, the domestic goldsmiths’ trade also facilitated the exchange of information about the places where precious minerals formed. I argue that these networks influenced both the questions and methods used to study the nature of the earth in the seventeenth century. Precious stones epitomized the problem of universal processes producing diverse patterns of mineral occurrence, while furnishing novel commercial networks and actors to investigate this phenomenon.

Period	6 Feb 2026
Held at	University of Antwerp, Belgium